Helvetia (1.0)

Helvetia is a faction founded by Swiss_Dave, and has a sister city in the form of Burgundy. It was located in the Alps, remarkably close to Rome due to the size and shape of the map in 1.0. Members were often referred to as "Mountain Jews" due to their percieved wealth and, of course, their location.

Pre-server
The leader of Helvetia, Swiss_Dave, casually found about the server during his daily lurking of /int/. Interested in the server, he got instructions as of how to join it thanks to some anonymous on the thread. Before being actually able to join the server, Dave interacted with the people therein and formed the server's first coalition, the Celtic Confederation, which included Helvetia, Belgica, Gauls, Britannia, Britons, Galitia and some celtiberian factions at its maximum extent.

Early days
The early days of Helvetia were days of peace, slow growth, increasing prosperity and friendly relations with the nations of all across the globe.

Travelling to Switzerland
Swiss_Dave founded Helvetia in the Swiss Alps in the early days of intcraft 1.0. He had brought carrots and potatoes and seeds from the luxuriant nation of Egypt, at the time very active, wherein he met first met Freddy120, who he later discovered to be the server's admin. As he managed to locate Switzerland on the map he started claiming the land around and planting the vegetables in the alpine lakes. Soon he encountered the magnificent and prosperous faction of Burgundiones, a mere couple hundreds blocks away. In the very first hours of his gameplay Swiss_Dave hadn't seen any Burgundian online, to his displeasure, as they had claimed a portion of land he considered to be rightful Swiss clay, and he wanted to ask them to unclaim some chunks.

Setting up and meeting Burgundiones
Luckily for him a minor reset happened. Thanks to this reset he made sure to claim the western side of Helvetia first, the one that was beforehand held by Burgundiones. They had not built anything on these chunks and never noticed the change. Shortly after claiming the strict necessary, Dave began building a 1 block tall wooden wall around the Alps, in almost the perfect shape of Switzerland (only later would he discover how blocky the claiming system was). The wall he had built was much larger than the area he could actually claim by the server's mechanics, but he did nonetheless claim anything in it to be his. At that point some Burgundians started logging in. Swiss_Dave feared the Burgundians and expected them to only wait the right moment to make him and his faction crumble. He so approached them and bothered their leader Ghekz, to come and see the wall he built and the land he claimed, to which he agreed. At this point Dave had a plantation of each vegetable and started hunting for animals to breed. Chicken, sheep and pigs were no trouble to find, but he had to wander to the western tip of Iberia to find any cows. Still fearing the Burgundians to be warmogering barbarians he decided to lure 3 cows eastwards towards Helvetia and Burgundy. Arriving by the Burgundians he offered 2 of the cows to fraternize with them and show them his goodwill. The Burgundians accepted the gift, as they had no cows yet, and Dave left after breeding a fourt baby cow to bring home.

The start of the growth
Alone on the Alps with his plants and animals, Dave started improving the walls and mining. To his surprise Dave found much larger quantities of coal, iron, gold, lapislazuli, redstone and diamonds that he was ever used to within the first moments of mining. So he discovered that all mountainous regions (Alps, Himalaya) were rigged as fuck with ores of all kinds, at higher layers than the vanilla ones too. Swiss_Dave became notorious for desperately looking for new members to join his faction in its first days of existence, and small Helvetia was looked down upon the larger factions on the server. After a couple days Helvetia had slightly grown, with a friend and risk player as him, Pantsbucket, and Pedro, a risk player aswell. Helvetia was a celtic nation, and Pedro insistently craved for a german one, therefore Dave never said anything about the true nature of the faction as not to lose one of the 2 members he had. As the days passed Dave continued making his walls bigger and taller, the town began having sparce buildings here and there, the Gotthard tunnel connecting north and south Helvetia was built, plantations grew, diplomatic expeditions were held across the world, especially with fellow celtic nations, and impressive wealth was stocked. Pedro nevertheless left to make his own faction Vikings by some regarded to be "the beginning of the end", regardless of opinions surely a Norse/Mercenaries-tier faction.

Flourishing Helvetia
With the help especially of Pantsbucket who started a massive campaign to recruit new players into the faction, which Dave followed, Helvetia started growing bigger, in the tier of 10-20 members. Notable players at the point were the mapper Noongah, who made Helvetia win the Map War of intcraft 1.0 and the third in command IvanTheForth, a risk player as Dave. Then the Great Hacking happened. Many big factions fell nearly into ruin. Notably Burgundy was half razed, and Egypt was almost completely destroyed, Judea was a memory. Quick to react, the leader of Helvetia offered any hack-refugee a cozy and rich safe home. Effectively this worked out pretty good, at least in the begin. The Burgundiones remained in their own faction and worked hard to repair the damage. A couple members of Egypt, for instance Hisin, joined Helvetia. And so did 2 members of the fallen Judea, SkyZ0ne and HeyItsJinx. Hisin left shortly after, in peace, while Jinx also left, but bringing almost all of Helvetia's wealth with him, as the Helvetians kept all their goods in shared chests in the storage room.

To be continued later, im tired tbh - Swiss Dave